Yeah obviously motivations are murky and all over the place, no one's free of bias. I'm not taking a strong stance on whether they're right or not or how much of it is motivated reasoning, I just think at least quite a bit is genuine (I'm mainly basing this off researchers I know who have a track record of being very sober and "boring" rather than the flashy Altman types)

To your point, yeah the models still suck in some surprising ways, but again it's that thing of they're the worst they're ever going to be, and I think in particular on the reasoning issue a lot of people are quite excited that RL over CoT is looking really really promising for this.

I agree with your broader point though that I'm not sure how close we are and there's an awful lot of noise right now